The one tip that will change the way you give feedback forever

One thing we can probably all agree on: giving feedback is often as hard as receiving it. Sometimes it’s worse. Like that old cartoon of the martinet father disciplining his child — this is going to hurt me more than it’s going to hurt you.

Sticks and stones, etc.

Except that isn’t true. Words hurt. Sometimes just as much as physical pain. The cognitive problem is that our brains, in a desperate attempt to protect us from psychological or social harm, run an internal narrative that invariably casts us as the good guy. The underdog. The victim. The misunderstood. Anything but the antagonist.

So a message that disrupts that story is not just unwelcome, our brains usually reject it as heresy.

Hardly surprising, then, that no one enjoys feedback, giving or receiving, unless it is overwhelmingly positive. Which may be indistinguishable from feedback that is overwhelmingly dishonest. And nobody likes that either.

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First, what not to do (at the risk of repeating a platitude). The Shit Sandwich. We can all see that one a mile off. We can all hear the but coming, and we all die a little inside as the final tokenistic sprinkle of positivity is piled on the roast. No, you really are great at making tea.

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What to do instead? Here’s a small but revealing trick I picked up after watching too much TV. Binge The Great British Bake Off, not MasterChef. No — this has nothing to do with what the presenters do off screen; this is a sharply focused but subtle lesson in delivering good feedback.

I’m willing to bet that, given the choice, most people would prefer to receive feedback from the Bake Off judges rather than the MasterChef judges, even if they can’t quite articulate why.

The reason is a simple flip of perspective. In MasterChef, the focus tends to be on what the participant has done wrong — on the failings of the person receiving the feedback. In Bake Off, the focus is more often on the perspective of the person giving it. It’s subtle, but it matters.

Consider these two alternatives:

• “You haven’t put enough sugar in this.” (MasterChef)

• “I’m not tasting enough sugar.” (Bake Off)

It's the same message, but one is an accusation, the other is an observation.

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Feedback that starts with I rather than you is generally simpler to serve, and easier to digest. It lowers the threat to the receiver’s identity, which makes them more able to hear the substance.

So instead of:

• “You didn’t handle that meeting well,”

try:

• “I didn’t feel that meeting went well — what was your perspective?”

Instead of:

• “You’re not integrating with the team,”

try:

• “I’m sensing integration may be an issue — how are you finding it?”

Instead of:

• “You missed those deadlines,”

try:

• “I didn’t receive those reports on time — is everything okay?”

In practice, many feedback conversations go wrong long before anyone opens their mouth. The real question is not how clever your phrasing is, but whether you’re prepared to own your perspective rather than judge someone else’s. Say what you saw, what you felt, what you missed — and watch how quickly the temperature drops.